Bacha posh

Bacha posh (Persian: بچه پوش‎‎, literally "dressed up as a boy") is a cultural practice in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan in which some families without sons will pick a daughter to live and behave as a boy. This enables the child to behave more freely: attending school, escorting her sisters in public, and working. Bacha posh also allows the family to avoid the social stigma associated of not having any male children. The issue of Bacha Posh has been highlighted in Jenny Nordberg's book The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan as well as in Iranian movie director Majid Majidi's 2001 film Baran.

Origins

The custom dates back one century and is still practiced today. It may have started with women disguising themselves as men to fight, or to be protected, during periods of wartime.

Historian Nancy Dupree told a reporter from The New York Times that she recalled a photograph dating back to the early 1900s during the reign of Habibullah Khan in which women dressed as men guarded the king's harem, because officially, the harem could be guarded by neither women nor men. "Segregation calls for creativity," she said, "These people have the most amazing coping capability."